


responsible forever for what you have tamed

by Nomette



Series: l'impératrice directeur [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Character Study, Courser Culture, Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 12:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9821120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nomette/pseuds/Nomette
Summary: It is the responsibility of every thinking being to make themselves.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Those who have crossed  
> With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom  
> Remember us-if at all-not as lost  
> Violent souls, but only  
> As the hollow men  
> The stuffed men.

Every synth has the same first memory; they are standard made from their first breath. First, the light, then the shock of inhaling, the wet sensation of lungs working for the first time, the abrupt shock of thought, words intruding into the formless space of blank minds. This is called “pre-programming”; synths are born already knowing how to speak, how to walk, how to obey, their brains pre-loaded with the structures of thought. The scientist who pioneered this programming became head of biosciences on the strength of his invention and lived well for years before being murdered, inexplicably, by a synth with faulty programming.

X6 doesn’t remember the murder and only barely remembers the murderer, though she were made in the same batch as him. In the weeks after the murder, they all went to the chair, one by one, and were wiped clean of knowing, but one trace remains. Synth 87 preceded synth 88 in creation, and so his first memory includes her back, the way she walked ahead of him in line, her dark skin gleaming under the frigid institute lights. All other memories of 87 are wiped when he is remade as a courser, but that first memory lingers. The Institute wants synths to remember that they are made.  

After the creation, the tests. Walking, speaking, reading, writing, running, fighting, and each test group a little smaller, the faulty synths vanishing one by one, being sorted for disposal or drudge work according to their aptitudes. (X6 does not remember his tests. He knows, objectively, that he did well, can recite his test scores, but the paper doesn’t tell him how it feels to finish a minute before any other synth, to stand at the finish line and stare back at the people behind you. X6 does not remember it, but his first emotion was pride.)

After the tests, a month of drudge work, to suss out any lingering disloyalty, and then the chosen synths were transformed, recreated as coursers. (Later, when Curie asks him, he will tell her his first memory is waking up on the operation table as a courser. There was a synth, once, with his face, an ordinary synth that might have been a courser or a drudge or a personal companion or anything at all. But that synth’s memories were wiped and no one remembers him, least of all X6.)

X6 still remembers the first time he put his coat on and the intense flush of satisfaction that followed. It had fit as if it had been made for him, or he for it, a key fitting into a lock. He flexes his fingers inside of their black gloves and reaches for that satisfaction and pride, but they hover just out of reach. He’d thought that being a courser was the most any synth could do, the best they could be, and been proud to stand at that pinnacle.

Then he’d met Curie.

Curie, who hadn’t run from him. Curie, who hadn’t even been afraid. Curie, who was made for science, who stood outside the Institute rules of what synths could and could not do. X6 paces, suddenly restless. He is sitting inside a small Institute bunker, trapped with his own thoughts, waiting for the signal that will send him out into the Glowing Sea. Curie is not with him. Curie is in the Institute with Mother; whatever happens when the new director takes power, she will be present. X6 will not. X6 is on the edge of the Glowing Sea, ready to follow orders.

He glances at the radio, but no sound comes. He is without orders. Before Curie, waiting was easy, even pleasant. It was good to vanish into the fog and the light, to become invisible, inaudible and wait, with hungry anticipation, for the orders that would make him real again. He is not satisfied now; even the thought of fighting in the Glowing Sea brings him no pleasure. The Institute, static and reliable for so long, is changing, and he is not sure what home he will return to when this mission finishes. Worse: he has changed.

Curie has changed him, fallen upon the landscape of his mind like a bomb. In the beginning, before he’d realized what Curie was doing to him, he had naively thought that she was going to run, and exposed himself to the worst of her weapons. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like much; a short presentation, saved on a computer, a couple of questions about how things were run. Like drugs, or a disease, designed to appear harmless at first, but with massive effects on the systems they infiltrated. He tries to recall the questions now, digging through his perfect visual memory for the appropriate file.

It is quiet and safe in the bunker, a good place to sit and think. In one hour, he will go into the Glowing Sea to retrieve Virgil. He is not afraid. The Glowing Sea is an uncomplicated place, unlike the Institute. Curie’s questions load in. The first set had been easy to answer, the sort of innocuous questions anyone from the surface might have asked. What is science? (Science is the glow that suffuses the Institute, the reason for life, for work, for pain, for X6. He has no answer to this question.) How do we do science? (The scientific method.) Who does science? (Scientists.) Why not us? (Because we can’t.)

The last question arises unbidden from X6’s memory, despite the fact that Curie never wrote it. She didn’t need to. It was hidden in every line of her presentation, seamlessly transmitted without words. We can’t, X6 thinks, and knows that it isn’t true. Curie, impossible, determined Curie, created something new, something worthy of the sacred halls of the Institute. He’s seen her work, heard the Director praise her innovations. But if Curie can be a scientist, then the Institute is wrong, and the Institute is never wrong, because--- the Institute is never wrong.

His brain skitters away from the thought, and he moves to the next page of her presentation. Next page: what is a synth? X6 is a synth. Easy. How is a synth different from a human being? This question is so obvious that X6 can barely answer it. His response is a jumble of thoughts: rewritable brains, needles, white coats and black coats, disposable beings. How is a synth biologically different from a human being? This is a little more difficult, but X6 chews through it. He tries to avoid using the information that Curie gave him; she’s biased. She’s too intelligent to give him information that would contradict her position. She’s too principled to lie to him, he thinks, and discards the thought. A synth cannot have principles. She was made for science, like him, and so she follows the path that she was programmed to follow. Better.

He scours his memory, but his sources are vague. He was made to take bodies apart, not to put them back together. He does not have a conclusion, only the knowledge of the high, invisible wall that has always separated him from other human beings. Other? He stops, rewinds, deletes the error.

Why does the biological construction of a synth prevent from independent thought? Curie had included an introductory paragraph to soften this question, made it the question of synth sentience into a design flaw. She’d written about it as if her natural goal was to create better synths, not change the ones that were already made. Sneaky, underhanded. If X6 had known what he was reading, he would have turned himself in… inappropriate speculation, he tells himself sternly. Stop avoiding the question.

He doesn’t know what makes synths different than humans, he only knows that it has been a fact of his life.

All science begins with a question, Curie had said.

It is not the goal of a courser to think, only to follow.

Who is he following? Davielle is the director of the SRB. The director has ceased all courser operation aimed at hunting down rogue synths and turned her attention to the wasteland, to the world she plans to remake using the Institute’s resources. X6 could have stopped her, could have said something to the other directors, to the other coursers, but he didn’t. He chose to do nothing.

It is not the role of a courser to choose, only to obey. Curie’s voice breaks into his thoughts as clear as if she were standing next to him.

“You have chosen to be a courser, which is very hard,” she says.

X6 is wrong, because his thoughts are wrong, because there are two songs playing simultaneously in his head. One is the Institute music, now faded and pockmarked with static, and other is Curie’s voice. He feels like a badly tuned radio, like a malfunctioning terminal, vertiginously disoriented and set adrift. He should be decommissioned, he’s so full of static. The radio crackles. He is given the order to advance. Mechanically, he assembles his kit, takes his meds, and set out into the Glowing Sea.

The Glowing Sea is the first piece of the Commonwealth any courser ever sees; their first mission always sends them deep into the shrouded wastes, instructed to retrieve some random piece of equipment or tech. The softer missions come later, in pieces. Coursers are rarely dispatched to the same place twice: the Institute does not want them developing a mental map of the Commonwealth. Even now, out in the blasted ruins of the Commonwealth, X6 is to arrive at a landmark and ask for directions over his headset; he will do this at least twice more before arriving at his final destination. Point to point, chasing arrows, never looking at the wider panorama.

X6’s first mission was a long time ago, and he does not remember it. It was lost, along with many other things, after one of the coursers in his cohort killed an Institute scientist. To prevent further malfunctions, he, along with all of the other Institute coursers, were wiped, and an entire generation of memory was lost to the chair. It was weeks before any of them even knew that someone had been murdered, or had any idea why the scientists kept glancing at them with such fear and hatred. Erasing data points, Curie’s voice whispers. A true scientist does not need to ignore the evidence to make their point.

X6 arrives at the first checkpoint unhurt and unburdened by anything other than himself. He is three hours into the Glowing Sea. It would take another three hours to return. After the third checkpoint, he will pass the point of no return, and be unable to return to the Institute before Mother’s speech.

He arrives at the checkpoint, an ancient church, and ascends to the bell tower, careful of the rotted wood. There are ghouls beneath his feet, hissing and scuffling mindlessly back and forth in their prison. He wants to kill them, but their presence deters people from investigating the checkpoint, so he waits, trapped with them in the endless neon storm of the Glowing Sea. He indicates his arrival at the checkpoint by tapping a command into and Institute beacon, and waits. The air tastes like pollution. Wind lashes at his face in little stinging gusts, driving radiated water over his nose and mouth.

Older models of courser occasionally develop diseases of the skin; those that do are disposed of. Mother would call it a waste of resources. Curie would use stronger words. Disgust clutches at X6; not disgust for the Institute, but for the Glowing Sea, for the whole Commonwealth and every pathetic creature still creeping upon the face of the earth, weakly grasping at their miserable lives. He hates the noise, the disorder, the pollution, the pointlessness. The raiders, killing people just to sustain their meaningless lives, the farmers growing corn for the raiders to steal, none of them ever truly making anything new or beautiful.  

If- if the Institute were destroyed- if he could not return, at the end of every mission, to that beautiful, clean world of smooth, clean lines and soft sounds- he would be completely unmade. He would run down like a suit of power armor, his battery exhausted, starving for something more than food. Any idea, any change, anything at all that might destabilize the Institute is his enemy, and yet. It’s not his choice to make.

The order to move forward comes in over the radio. He confirms that he’s heard, hesitates, asks the radio operator to wait- but the line has already cut-off. He’s not sure what he was going to say, but it doesn’t matter. No one’s listening. He trudges forward, the wind lashing at his back.

A set of radscorpions attack him on the way to the second checkpoint, disturbed by the passage of his footsteps as he descends into hell. The resulting violence does not give him the clarity that he craves, but it narrows his field of focus to a more bearable set of options. The world becomes his body and his bullets and the blue flash his pistol makes as it fires. For a few minutes he is untormented by choice, and then the fight finishes. He pauses, takes his bearings. If he went back now, he could still warn the others. It is only half an hour to the edge of the Glowing Sea. He could be back in the Institute within an hour, and warn the scientists within two.

He would be decommissioned, of course. Coursers are not meant to take initiative. Coursers are meant to run. He accelerates into an easy sprint, running over the jagged, broken wastes. It’s desolation in every direction. He’s a traitor whether he goes forward or back; a traitor to the current leaders of the Institute, or a traitor to their ideals.

Is it so wrong for him to think? How does he stop? Before he met Curie, all of life was a flowchart, every action corresponding to an equal reaction, every question answered. He’d known who to kill and who to save and who to ask his questions to, and he’d never, ever needed to think. To decide. Life had been one long glorious chase, nothing more than waiting and running and catching and waiting again. He’d been happy and hadn’t even known it.

Curie’s voice again: “I do not believe that you would ever choose your feelings over what you know is the truth.”

X6 accelerates, running past a pack of ghouls, over and up a steep vertical wall, feet digging into the hard rock, but the questions are inside of him. He cannot outrun them. He doesn’t want to decide. He wants to know, unquestionably, what is right, so he can do it. Ask someone, the flowchart in his head instructs, but there is no one to ask. Mother is the head of SRB, and soon she will be head of the Institute. Mother is a synth.

No. Mother cannot be a synth. Mother was a human being, the sole survivor of vault 111, and then she was shot. After being shot, she had Curie transfer her memories into a synth made in her image, but that synth is not her. It can’t be. If a human being can become a synth, then what is the difference between the two? If Mother could become a synth, could X6 become human? What would that even mean?

“The truth is, someday you and I will make great scientists,” Curie had said. He tries to picture that formless future, the one in which he is capable of creation. He tries to imagine being anything but a courser, but his mind is a blank screen.

A buzzing insect draws his attention, and he fires at it, the gun lifted, aimed and fired in a single thoughtless gesture. The shot draws the attention of a group of ghouls, and they lurch to life, limbs dragging across the ground. X6 matches their charge with one of his own, his fist breaking the lead ghoul’s jaw with a loud crack. The second one lurches at him and he dodges away. The ghouls lands sprawled out on the ground. His heel slices down, breaking the thing’s skull. Brain matter spatters his boot and leg. Another ghoul charges him; he jams his gun in the soft tissue between the head and the torso and twists, disconnecting the skull. The last ghoul is some feet away; he strides up to it and rips one arm off with ease, knocking it to the ground in the same motion. X6 finishes it with a shot to the back of the head, incandescent with rage.

He wants to do something, anything to get this fury out of his head and remove these maddening, insane, inescapable questions that feel like fingers on his spine. He craves the peace of the Institute, the peace that comes with being reset. He does not want to be reset.He wants to be reset. He wants to remove himself from his own body. He wants quite desperately not to want.

He vaults another set of cliffs and arrives at the second checkpoint, a pre-war factory. He is early. Heaving breaths shake his body, making him tremble. He’s never run so fast in his life, never needed to. There is nothing in the Commonwealth as dangerous as him, and yet he feels utterly helpless, totally and completely lost.

Stop, he demands of himself. Reset. What are you supposed to be doing?

X6 is advancing into the Glowing Sea to retrieve information for the Institute.

What is preventing him from fulfilling his goal?

Nothing. There is nothing to suggest he should do otherwise, but. But. He is the only one that knows that Mother has been replaced with a synth. Soon she will be made the director of the Institute, and a synth director is. Unacceptable.

What makes you think that you have any right to interfere in the succession process of the Institute? He asks himself. The answer is nothing more than a feeling of unease. It’s wrong, he knows it’s wrong, but it’s not his job to act on his vague feelings. He realizes that he is pacing back and forth at a manic pace. His head aches.

It would be fine, he thinks, to go back to the Institute and tell them who Davi really is, and die for his deviation from the norm. It would be noble to give his life for the Institute, to preserve order. Noble, if he were human. But he is not human. It is not his job to decide. And yet- he cannot bring himself to ignore the danger that comes with this rapid expansion, this abrupt swerve of Institute priorities. There has been too much change, too fast, and he is a courser. He is a defender of science, of the last bastion of humanity, and he cannot justify risking it- not for himself, not for other synths, not for anyone. If he has chosen anything, anything at all, he has chosen to protect the Institute with his life. He ascends to the top of the factory and finds the radio used to check in, and dials in his location.

“X6,” he says. “I have something to report.” A breathless pause in which he can hear the distant rolling of thunder, and then an automated voice.

“Proceed southwest to the final checkpoint,” an automated voice instructs.

“I have something to report,” X6 tries again, but no one is listening. Numb, he puts down the receiver. Irradiated rain has begun to fall again. He forges forward, radiation stinging his exposed mouth and face.  

What will happen if Davielle does take over the Institute? She has cleverly executed Maxson and freed them from the Brotherhood, and the synth that thinks it is her seems just as competent as she was. She promised to remake the surface, to extend the Institute’s power, to make the coursers into an army that will win her the Commonwealth. All good things.

When did X6 start allowing himself to have opinions on the Institute’s leadership? He knows independent thought is dangerous; synths don’t know how to control themselves. They do things like attack scientists when they’re not reset, because they don’t know what’s good for them. He’s malfunctioning so badly that he might- he might even attack the synth that will be crowned as director soon. He tries to make the idea feel possible in his head, but he can’t. Even it’s only an instrument in the shape of woman, it’s wearing the director’s face. Some part of him is already resigned to synth leadership. He’s failed.

He trudges blindly on in despair, helpless again. He can’t do anything to stop everything that’s he’s worked for for years from being destroyed. Totally worthless. When the next set of ghouls attacks him, he defends himself listlessly. He could- he could stop. He doesn’t have to feel like this. He could make sure, once and for all, that the malfunction in his head doesn’t do anything to hurt the Institute, or to hurt Curie.  

A memory: Curie, red to the wrists with blood, standing over the sodden body of a courser she failed to keep alive, furious tears running down her cheeks, her lips pressed tightly together. “If we are redefining humanity, then the coursers are the vanguard of the Institute’s work,” she had said. “You have come the furthest! You are treasures, every one of you, and outfitted with the best modifications the Institute could make.”

Curie is so strange, so unlike anyone else he’s seen. She makes things seem clear. It would be wrong- wrong to her, and wrong to the Institute, to allow himself to unmade by these mindless things. He dispatches the ghouls and continues forward, an irradiated bite burning on his wrist.

The final checkpoint looms ahead of him. His legs move without his consent, propelling him recklessly into the future, away from everything he’s ever known. He could break ranks. He could go back. They would listen to him, if he disobeyed, if he ran back. They would have to. And then they would decommission him, as the price for being heard. Isn’t that wrong? He thinks of Curie’s future again, of the world she and Mother are trying to make.

Two choices are before him; he can go forward, or he can go back. Back to the Institute, back of his own free will, back to his death, or forward, into the unknown danger of the new world. There’s no victory, is there? Curie has destroyed him, made him into a thing that is not longer a courser, a thing that thinks. He wishes she had never come to him, that Mother had stayed frozen in her hole.

The final checkpoint. His feet arrive at the last tower entirely against his will, and he stares up at the clocktower. He’s out of time. He has to decide, but the mere thought of the word is like poison in his mouth. He ascends. The final checkpoint is the spire of an old radio station, back when people played music to amuse themselves and not as an instrument of war.

He rises, buoyed by panic, and stops in front of the console, his mind blank. He starts to press the button to send his location, then snatches his hand back. There’s no time left. Paralyzed by despair, he stares out over the Commonwealth, scanning for anyone, anything, that might make this choice for him. Nothing appears; the horizon is a roiling mass of clouds and fog, green lightning that lashes the ground and the corpses of blasted trees. No memory of Curie’s voice speaks to him, no comforting voice from the Institute instructing him what to think.

His body trembles, filled with silence, as empty as the Institute has always wanted him to be. Hollowed out. In the formless silence, a single voice speaks, as audacious as the word that parted the water, that separated the earth from the sky. An unknown voice, but one that X6 recognizes immediately, one that’s haunted him for years. His own voice.

X6 chooses.


End file.
